Chemical [se]X (23 page)

Shidi leaned suddenly against Agatha’s side, fingers exploring the spots beneath her ribcage. Agatha went taut again, just as she had with the man at the outdoor bar. From Shidi’s face, Agatha guessed she was supposed to laugh, but actually she wanted to cry. Without the chocolate, Agatha felt too coiled and protective to enjoy Shidi’s teasing touch.

Frowning, Shidi took Agatha’s hand instead, pulling it toward her bare, brown belly. Had Brent Reynolds simply been able to participate in this? Hadn’t it felt strange to him? Agatha couldn’t imagine what sort of man he had been.

She half-heartedly stroked Shidi’s skin, wishing she could be moved by its lush warmth. Agatha wished they’d pass the herb around already. It felt as if bugs were crawling in her hair, and the smile had faded from the woman in her arms. She tried to hide her discomfort by pressing her nose to Shidi’s hair, but the scent she encountered made her think too much of Sister Maris Stella, Brother Anselm, and Gerald. She felt homesick for places that had never felt like home, and that was when she knew this wouldn’t be home either.

To her left and right, the ritual was well underway. Two women lay intertwined, idly exploring between each other’s legs, sighing sweetly. A man rested his head on one of their shoulders, tugging at his cock, occasionally breathing the cunt-scented fingers of the woman beneath him. On the other side, a woman smiled flirtatiously and slipped between two men embracing. They rearranged for her seamlessly, as the jungle seemed to have done for the village, one filling her cunt and the other ass, accepting her without interrupting their kissing.

No one seemed to need to wait for the tea except for Agatha. It made sense, she supposed—living each day without inhibition, how much need could there even be for an herb to destroy what little remained? She sucked gently at Shidi’s earlobe, counting to thirty, then sixty, then 240. She wanted the easy tenderness she saw around her. Like so many other things, it didn’t seem to be for her.

Finally, finally, a warm stone cup appeared at Agatha’s left elbow, exuding the aroma of cut grass and rotting leaves. Agatha took it and sipped gratefully, only to frown in consternation a second later. Gerald had complained that
Virgin
was cashed-out bullshit, barely strong enough to be worth eating, but this was many times weaker than that. Experience at college taught her that unless she managed to drink several gallons of this, it wouldn’t do a thing for her hang-ups. Stunned, she passed the cup to Shidi, who took a demure sip, then kissed Agatha full on the mouth.

This was beautiful. Agatha wanted this. But a prayer to the Lady of Abstinence came to her mind and locked her jaw closed. “I’m sorry,” she said in English, pulling away. Then again, in fumbling varieties of Panoan dialects, she tried more apologies.

Shidi’s face hardened, and she shoved Agatha once, hard, pushing her several crucial feet away from the fire. Though the rain forest was hot, the night seemed cold outside the circle of light. The villagers stared at her silently. Then deliberately, one by one, they turned their backs.

No language was needed to explain what had happened. If this place had ever been home for her, it wasn’t any more. If this was where the religious elders had found her, they had removed her from it so thoroughly that Agatha realized she couldn’t come back, not even to visit.

***

The villagers sent a man and a woman to conduct Agatha to the edge of their territory. No matter how she tried, neither would respond to her broken Panoan, and when the sun went down and it was time to drink the sacred
upash
, they excused themselves and shared the ritual without her.

Agatha crept through the trees once to watch them sipping tea with elbows intertwined, his cock bare and proud, her legs spread negligently. They tickled and teased each other. Their touches were sweet and free of shame, not urgent and debauched the way Agatha’s experiences had been. The man squirmed the tip of his finger into the fold behind the woman’s knee, and playfully licked the woman’s nose as he did. The woman licked the side of his ear in return, then coaxed his legs up onto her shoulders, cupped his balls, and worked her finger into his asshole with the same gentle, rascally air he had used for his more innocent pursuit.

They rolled on their patch of earth as if they were part of it, burying their noses in the dirt with as much joy as they buried them in each other. By the time the man parted the woman’s legs to lick her to ecstasy, Agatha’s cheeks were wet and she could not bear to watch another moment.

She had thought she would be too proud to set up her tent or use other conveniences—she hadn’t wanted to prove how she’d been spoiled by the people who’d raised her. After this exclusion, though, she gave in to comfort. Perhaps her people had been right about her all along. She might share their blood, but she wasn’t one of them. Sister Maris Stella and all the others who had taught her the ways of Our Lady of Abstinence had made sure of that.

During the hot, humid days, she studied the man and woman who trekked beside her, body aching with recognition.
Flesh of my flesh
, she thought. From the way their necks curved to their shoulders to the length of their second toes to the lanky rhythms of their gaits, they were her kin.

They abandoned her on the bank of a river she barely managed to identify, turning their backs with no word of farewell, leaving her peering at her compass and waterlogged maps. Agatha made her slow way out of the rain forest, too steeped in misery to feel the bites of exotic bugs or the bursting blisters on her feet. She didn’t pray to the Lady, but neither did she seek out the pleasures of the flesh.

By the time she returned to the city of Belem, her soul was numb. The scents of freshly caught fish and tropical fruit didn’t reach her stomach. All she could feel was constant disorientation. When she spied people who looked like her, she smiled a greeting only to find the words tangled and clumsy on her tongue, academic and partial, never fluent enough to make her belong. When she passed missionaries in their stifling black outfits, she nodded solemnly only to be scowled at in return, or dismissed with gestures of warding against evil.

Agatha found her way to the Basilica de Nossa Senhora de Nazare. She barely recognized the Virgin as she was portrayed in this place. Here, she could not imagine calling her the Lady of Abstinence—even rendered in marble, her skin was too warm, the shape of her cheeks too sensual. And formed from stained glass, she glowed as much with the knowledge of a woman as with spiritual energy.

The only people in the church at that hour were old, nut-brown women, sucking their teeth and rocking in the pews, clacking rosary beads, smelling of rubber trees and grilled fish. Agatha found a spot away from them, in a section of a pew bathed in light filtered to a tender orange by the stained glass. She knelt and tried to summon an old prayer.

Her mind raced. Neither English nor the Panoan dialect of the villagers felt truly native to her. The prayer came out garbled, fouled with marketing language and half-remembered wishes whispered by Agatha’s lost, unknown mother. In the end, she sat back in the pew and pulled a few things from her backpack: the Bible she had taken from Brother Anselm, a sprig of the herb the villagers used to make the sacred
upash
, and the tiny golden box Gerald had given her, decorated with gold filigree, marked
Premium
.

She stroked the side of the box. She knew now that the dose of herb it contained was hundreds of times stronger than anything the villagers used in their rituals. It might very well make her into the lust-crazed beast the brothers and sisters had always warned her about.

Agatha wondered who were the real demons. The villagers, her true people, seemed too pure to merit such a term, but they had rejected her with such finality, such utter coldness, that she could not think as kindly of them as she would have liked. The people of Our Lady of Abstinence had stolen her from her family and forced their ways upon her, filled her with their fears, and projected their images of evil onto her. She could remember, however, that they had been sometimes kind. They had become her parents, and, though false, had raised her as their true child. Brent Reynolds and the company that had exploited his discoveries could certainly be considered demons—they had taken advantage of her people’s generosity and rituals and created the world of sin that so terrified her former religious community. On the other hand, Brent Reynolds had been blessed and foolish enough to enjoy what he’d been given by the villagers, rather than questioning it as Agatha had. And Gerald—a part of her swore he couldn’t be a demon, but hadn’t he been her greatest temptation?

Perhaps Agatha herself was the demon, the creature who didn’t belong on earth, destined to do the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had been cast out of more than one heaven and had proven unable to adapt herself to more than one vision of hell.

She studied the items on the pew beside her. Sister Maris Stella had thought to test her at 18, when she’d been too naive to understand what was at stake, for her soul or otherwise. Agatha understood that the true test came now, when there was no one left to command her and she had no choice but to command herself.

She took up the items and approached the altar. This was no ritual practiced by anyone she had met, but she knew in her bones it was the right thing to do. She placed the Bible on its surface, and on top of it she set the herb and the box of chocolates. Agatha no longer needed to be protected from herself—whether that protection came in the form of prohibitions or the convenient excuse of intoxication or the permission granted by ritual.

Somewhere, someone murmured in consternation, a low, deep voice carried far by the Basilica’s arches, which were made to echo. Agatha ignored that and strode out of the church, shedding her past with each step.

She went to the outdoor bar and found a beautiful woman, hair bleached nearly white from the sun, face good-naturedly wrinkled by an excessive tan and an easy smile. She followed the woman to her room at an inn and stripped away her clothes and kissed every inch of her. She sucked the woman’s toes until she tasted the path she had walked in her life. She tickled the woman’s ankles and wriggled the tip of her finger into the fold behind her knee.

Agatha dragged her teeth gently over the woman’s inner thigh. A few grays made her pubic hair glitter in the sun from the window. The woman giggled. “You never even asked my name,” she said.

Agatha grinned. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Polly.”

“Nice to meet you.” She stroked the hair out of the way, parted the woman’s labia, and felt for moisture. She drew out Polly’s wetness and spread it slowly and carefully over her clit and inner lips, then flicked out her tongue and tasted it. Agatha gasped with surprise. The woman’s flesh was sweaty and sweet, salty with need, pure as water. It was the first time she’d tasted that simple, human flavor, unadulterated by chocolate or herbs.

“Everything all right down there?” Polly was turning pink and bashful.

Agatha started, petting her pliant again. “Everything is lovely. You’re lovely. You’re delicious. You taste like desire.” She licked that flavor up until her own greedy saliva overpowered it, then drew out more wetness so she could taste it again. She pressed her fingers into Polly and smiled up at her.

Resettling to a more comfortable position, Agatha pressed her nose to Polly’s entrance. Polly was no Virgin, she was sure, and yet she smelled of undiscovered pleasure. Agatha closed her eyes and licked until her jaw was sore, daydreaming of the beautiful man she might taste tomorrow.

About the Authors

Annabeth Leong
wears high heels and frequents the former haunts of H.P. Lovecraft. One month, she is a baseball fanatic, and the next she’s reading about squid. She is frequently confused about her sexuality, but enjoys searching for answers. Her latest erotic novel is Untouched, from Sweetmeats Press. Find Annabeth online at annabetherotica.com.

C. E. Hansen
is an American writer currently living in New Jersey. She writes Erotic Romance novels ranging from suspenseful thrillers, to romantic comedy. She has also written a Young Adult Paranormal Romance, Unlikely Hero, under the pseudonym, C.E. O’Brien. Her debut novel It’s A Crime was released May 2013, her follow up novel, and second book in the series, It’s A Shame, was released November 2013. Her newest novel, Act Accordingly was just released July 2014.

After earning a degree in literature from Wagner College, she had set aside her dream of writing in order to pay her mortgage, and has worked various jobs including, an OTC Trading Desk on Wall Street, Administrative Assistant in a bus company, a law office, and is presently working in a wine and gourmet food shop.

C.E. is a member of RWA and is active in three creative writing critique groups. She has just completed her fifth novel, which is to be released in the near future and is working on two other thrilling stories. If she’s not working on her latest sexy thrilling story, you can find her reading, or indulging in her unhealthy addiction to chocolate. You can find C. E. online at www.c-e-hansen.me

A 2010 Lambda Literary Foundation fellow,
Dario Dalla Lasta
received a B.A. and J.D. from Pepperdine University. Previous work appears in anthologies for Go Deeper Press, The Round Up Writer’s Zine, ImageOut Write, NewTown Writers Chicago, and Best of PANIC. His erotically charged debut novel The Three Red Lines is included in the Lavender Library Archives & Cultural Exchange in his hometown of Sacramento, CA. Dario is also a DJ and model based in Brooklyn, NY. Find Dario online at dariodallalasta.com

Ella Dawson
is a twenty-something feminist who cares too much about Friday Night Lights. She writes erotica for all genders, and her fiction can be found in New Smut Project’s
Heart, Body Soul: Erotica With Character
this fall. Her blog is home to book reviews, pop culture criticism through a feminist lens, and essays about sexuality and sexual health. Download her free erotic romance e-book Memory Foam right from her blog - ellacydawson.wordpress.com